


grace too powerful to name

by chalahandra



Series: Polyquisition [6]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Deliberate Acts of Kindness, Dragon Age Quest: Promise of Destruction, Dragon Age Quest: Well Shit, F/M, Friends to Something Approaching Lovers, Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, Mildly Touch-Starved Cassandra, Red Templars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 17:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10971657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chalahandra/pseuds/chalahandra
Summary: Cassandra never believed in second chances, before.





	grace too powerful to name

**Author's Note:**

> The Emerald Graves have never been kind. Red Templars, even less so.

Cassandra wakes in a tent, ribs aching in the way that means they're cracked. Cataloguing her hurts has become a ritual, one as core to her being as the Chant itself. Most pain to least: ribs, neck, head, left arm (shield), right arm (axe), hips, left knee, right knee. Breathing is an issue. The shadows of leaves dance across the canvas. They're in the Emerald Graves, trying to stop the tide of Freemen from turning out the smallfolk. 

Except the Red Templars had been there too, with cages.

The Behemoth!

Cassandra pushes herself up, and nearly goes right back down when dark pulls at the edge of her vision. It's only a broad, warm hand that holds her upright.

"Easy, Seeker." Varric. He holds her there while she gasps for air, ribs burning with every inhale. A little traitor part of her brain is glad that he's there, but she ruthlessly shoves it back down. He presses a rounded vial into her hand - not a healing potion, but one that promoted regeneration. Adaar had shared the recipe with Adan when they realised that normal potions were essentially just bandages when it came to lingering injuries.

She chokes down less than a quarter before she feels like she's going to be sick, and pushes it back at Varric urgently. It's then that she notices that Varric's leg is splinted and bandaged.

\--

Varric talks, and the shadows slide slowly over the canvas. His words fill in the gaps that Cassandra has - they'd been escorting a group of refugees, they were jumped by Red Templars that weren't meant to be there, there'd been a fucking Behemoth and then she was here.

Turns out the Behemoth had gotten in a lucky swing when she'd been standing over one of the refugee kids, which sent her spine-first into one of the many gnarled tree trunks. According to Varric, Adaar thinks she was already unconscious when she hit the tree 'because you wrapped around it like a ragdoll', and Bull had agreed with her assessment when they'd made it back to camp.

"Adaar did not carry me." Varric hums an agreement beside her. They're both lying down now, after Cassandra had nearly passed out from the effort of breathing while upright. It's just them, the surviving refugees, and Blackwall. The scouts are out establishing some kind of perimeter, and Adaar took the remaining chunk of companions out to close a nearby Rift. "And Solas is certainly not strong enough."

"You got me, Seeker. I carried you back." Cassandra blames the quickening of her pulse on pain as she shifts, pulling a twig out from under her back.

"On a broken leg?" Varric snorts, a thoroughly inelegant sound.

"Please, it's just dislocated." She turns her head to face him, ignoring the throbbing that the movement started. "Don't look at me like that."

"Look at you how?" He raises an eyebrow at her in return, sardonic as ever.

"Like I'm not strong enough to haul a warrior in full plate around. If I managed it with Junior - who's taller than you, by the way - then I can manage Cassandra Pentaghast, Seeker Extraordinaire." Cassandra rolls her eyes, and moves back to looking up. Quiet reigns. Beyond her own outrageously loud heartbeat, and the sighing of the breeze, she can hear quiet crying, and Blackwall's distinctive low rumble.

"How many did we lose?" The softness in her own voice is a surprise.

"Four. Very nearly five." Her brow crinkles. That can't be right. Fabric shifts, and then Varric rises into view, propping himself up on one arm. "Cassandra, you weren't breathing when Adaar got to you."

His face is-- too solemn. But she cannot believe it. No. Not in somewhere like this, somewhere so. So ordinary.

"Surely not." But there's no heat in her words.

"No pulse, no breath. It felt like forever before you started breathing by yourself." She turns her head away. She knows what he's referring to. Adaar once jumped into a lake to pull out a drowned child, and pumped his chest until he vomited up the brackish water and took in a shuddering breath. To think that Adaar had been forced to do that for her... Cassandra shivers, suddenly cold despite herself. She wants to curl into a ball and forget the Graves. She wants to cut out the knowledge that she had died, however briefly, and ignore it. Leliana will cluck. Josephine will _cry_.

A warm hand on her shoulder. She glances back over. Varric is offering the half-drunk regeneration potion. She accepts it with hands that tremble in an unacceptable manner. He helps her drink it down, and this time there's no burst of nausea. She closes her eyes, and resolutely goes to sleep.

\--

Varric's knee is slow to heal, prompting quips about his 'advanced age' of thirty-eight when Adaar gets back. Cassandra feels far older than her own thirty-something years, given that anything slower than an amble has her swaying. Her back aches constantly, and she's having some trouble in moving her right shoulder properly. Neither of which bodes well for the bone-clattering ride back across the Frostbacks.

Adaar gives her Nuggalope up, trading to Cassandra's spirited charger. Although she complains heavily, the bizarre creature moves with utmost delicacy across even the Graves' rough terrain, keeping the pain to a minimum. The whole group is glad to leave the Emerald Graves behind. Aside from Cassandra dying (however briefly) and Varric fucking up his knee, Bull's old injury had kept him camp-bound after a particularly nasty bear attack, Blackwall had three broken fingers and the world's ugliest bruising after being used as a cudgel by Maker-forsaken giants, and Solas was nursing both a concussion and a broken face after an enterprising Freeman mage threw a boulder at him.

"As far as I'm concerned, the Elves can have the Dales back." Mutters Adaar, Marked arm in a sling to keep her collarbone aligned. "Between the bears and the giants, I never want to go back there ever again." Thankfully, once they're out of the forest, they make good time.

\--

The steps up to the Great Hall have never looked so very numerous or so very threatening, and Cassandra is well aware of the looks they are drawing as they ride in. Dorian is waiting, as is Sera, and their combined yell nearly puts Solas in an early grave. For once, she does not protest the assistance of the Valo-Kas, for she's concentrating really hard on not passing the fuck out from the thinner air. She hears Hawke swearing at Varric, but it seems very fuzzy, and far away. The last thing she notices is Shokrakar peering at her face, and then she's out.

\--

Cassandra breathes in, and opens her eyes. This is not her old space over the forge, but the quiet room that Josephine had made up for her, closer to the War Room. There's a fire in the grate, and a candle beside her bed. 

Most surprisingly, she doesn't hurt. As she sits up, her ribs twinge a little, but there's no darkness at the edge of her vision, no impending rush of nausea. There is, however, one Josephine Montilyet staring back at her. 

Apparently Josie has acquired the power of teleportation while she was away, because one moment their Ambassador is seated by the fire, and the next she is wrapping Cassandra in a cinnamon-scented hug. She's crying. Of course she is. Cassandra has become much less awkward about hugging since Haven, and leans into her friend with a sigh. They stay like that for a long, peaceful moment, and then separate. Josie perches herself on the mattress and rubs at her running kohl with a handkerchief.

"Someone healed me." The roughness in her own voice is a surprise. How long has she been back?

"I know you may find it hard to believe, but it was Anders."

" _What_?" After how she'd reacted when it was revealed that he'd snuck in with the Valo-Kas?

"Solas was barely able to walk, Cassandra. He certainly couldn't have done it. So, yes, Anders healed you. With Hawke hovering beside him all the while." That mental image throws Cassandra for a loop, and she lies back down to process it. Josie curls up next to her, and she finds herself slipping back to sleep.

\--

Cullen puts her on rest for two weeks. She argues that it should only be one. He has her run her standard drills, and then has to catch her before she faceplants into the dummy. After that, she feels that two weeks may have been optimistic. Adaar notices. They have words. Some of them are kind, others less so.

Varric resumes his spot by the fire in the Hall, and she finds herself stopping there to catch her breath. Maker's breath, she used to run laps around Haven and keep up with Adaar's longer legs easily. Now the two dozen stairs up to the Hall are her worst enemy. Varric is also struggling, but as a Rogue, his mobility is so much more vital than hers. She's seen him run up near-sheer cliffs and vault off to gain the advantage on enemies. His nimbleness has been his saving grace in a hundred fights. As a warrior, she can afford to stand there and taunt their enemies into smashing themselves upon her shield. If she can stand, she can fight. Varric needs that mobility to get the best shot on his targets, especially when they're covered in crystalline armour.

He's also sharing a room with three other adults and an infant. Not the best environment to recover from a potentially career-ending injury. So maybe that's why she offers a side of her overly large bed to him when she limps out of the library one evening, well past midnight. And maybe it's just that he's tired enough to accept.

She catches him as he staggers to standing, leg half-asleep. They must look quite the pair, the Seeker and the story-teller, leaning on each other like a pair of drunkards.

Her rooms are on the level with the Hall, and as she opens her door, Varric whispers a very quiet prayer to the Maker that he's managed to avoid stairs. There's a moment when they pause with their clothing halfway off, look at each other, and then continue undressing. They've bathed in the Oasis together, and he was in the tent when Adaar changed her bandages. There's very little of each other that they haven't seen.

"Didn't picture you for a hedonist, Cassandra." It's said in jest as he tests the softness of the mattress, but it's enough to leave her speechless. He's never used her given name before. In reply, she blows out the candle, and shoves her face into the pillow. Varric chuckles, a rich sound that gives her goosebumps.

Sleep comes quickly that night.

\--

Morning finds Cassandra curled around him, breathing slow and deep into Varric's hair. She's not entirely sure how long she lies there awake, trying desperately to ignore how nice it feels to hold a warm body. His breathing is slow and even, and it's harder then she thinks to pull herself away from him and get dressed. Regalyan would have wanted her to be happy. But it still feels like a betrayal to his memory, for all that they never married.

If Varric is awake when she leaves the room, he does a very good job of hiding it.

\--

A week later, she offers him the same. Dawn finds their positions reversed, Varric's fingers tangled in her tunic. Cassandra drifts, unable to shake the grip of sleep as easily as she should. Eventually she realises that he's hard - not grinding against her, just snoozing away with an erection very firmly pressed against her. She gently coaxes his fingers open, sliding towards the edge, but he pulls her back in with surprising strength. A hand runs from just under her breasts to her hips, and he sighs.

Cassandra's throat is suddenly dry. _When he wakes up,_ she tells herself, _you will tell him, and this will not happen again._

Varric wakes when one of the kitchen staff knock at her door to deliver breakfast. She does not tell him, and he says nothing in return.

Three days later, she offers again.

\--

Bianca Davri comes to Skyhold, and Cassandra's world shatters quietly around her. Adaar takes Varric, Sera, and herself out to the Hinterlands. Cassandra tells herself repeatedly that it's just jealousy that sets her teeth on edge around Bianca, as they hack through Carta and Darkspawn alike.

The confession nearly breaks Varric, and Cassandra feels sick to her stomach when she realises what that buzzing noise was. Red lyrium infection.

Outside Valammar, Adaar mutters about the difference between bad ideas and worse ideas. Sera loudly joins in, glad for the distraction. Varric looks her dead in the eyes, and asks silently. She can only shake her head, and it cuts a little deeper when he buries his face in his hands.

\--

She dreams of Daniel that night, and of something wearing Daniel's skin, and it's only when Cole wakes her that she knows she has to go back to Caer Oswin. The demon-boy follows her, silent as a shadow. She leaves a note - _I have to go somewhere. I'll be back in a week. Cassandra._

She needs no map to find her way here, and she rides hard. She finds herself speaking the Chant wordlessly; Tranfigurations first, then Trials. Neither helps to stave off the impending sense of wrongness as she ascends the hill.

There are no Red Templars in Caer Oswin. There's no one at all, not even the bodies left behind after the battle. This was once a home. Now, it is a monument to the fallen.

Cassandra Pentaghast falls to her knees and howls her heart out on the cold, empty stones. Faith had come to her once, but now she feels a shell, emptied of anything she could believe in. Everyone she loved has died a violent death, and each and every time, she could do nothing.

\--

Skyhold looms above her, barely visible in the gloom. She is saluted by the guards on duty, and her lip curls. A familiar action, for all that she feels dead inside. Cole takes her horse, and in the dark, he looks almost real. This late, even the tavern is closed. The only lights that still burn are the braziers on the walls, and by the stairs that lead into the Great Hall.

The fire where Varric holds court has burned down to embers. Not even the Orlesians are still awake. Perhaps it is better this way, that there is no one she has to explain herself to. Cassandra ignores the crawling sensation of loneliness, and turns down the corridor to her room. She has been lonely before, and survived. This is merely another trial to overcome.

Her room-- has someone in it. There is the faint flicker of firelight under the door. She opens it slowly, surveying her space. Sturdy boots lie by the door. On the mantle, familiar gold jewelry shines reddish in the low light. A red silk shirt is thrown over the arm of the chair that sits by the fire. And in her bed, lies a dwarf-sized lump, snoozing away. Something in her chest unclenches, and Cassandra lets out the breath she didn't know she was holding.

She strips, night air raising goosebumps. Cold water sets her pulse accelerating even as she wipes away the grime of the road. Her sleep tunics have been washed and put away in the dresser. She winces at the noise the drawer makes, hastily closing it.

A sleepy question rises from the bed, and Cassandra moves closer as she slips the well-worn cotton over her head. Varric blinks up at her, eyes soft, as she slides under the covers. She curls her hand around his, and very deliberately closes her eyes. The bedframe squeaks a little as he moves closer, sliding an arm around her shoulder.

He stays.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes courtesy of It's Quiet Uptown, from Hamilton.
> 
> Also I've been meaning to write something for this ship for years. There is a prequel of sorts in the works, and Maker willing it'll take less than an age to be published.


End file.
